“I guess you could say that.”
“Dad.”
“Let’s just take a little ride and see.”
The appraisal, it turned out, was in Belgium, an unincorporated town that was little more than a crossroads. The house was a typical “starter home,” small and dark, set too close to the road. Half a dozen houses just like it stretched in either direction. Train tracks passed several hundred feet from the front drive. My father fished the tape measure from underneath the seat, and I grabbed the clipboard. We both got out of the car.
“Nice, level lot,” he said.
Petunias grew along the sidewalk leading up to the front door. I could already see my mother’s ad: CHARMING 3BR/1BA in quiet, country setting.
“Twelve hundred square feet,” my father said, guessing. We measured the exterior and found it was exactly that. Inside, the house was vacant. The carpet was faded at the center of the living room, darker around the edges, and you could see where each piece of furniture had been: couch, chair, ottoman, TV console. I caught a faint whiff of septic, which my father had taught me to identify. I noted the lack of storm windows, the electric heat. I waited for my father to tell me, as he always did, that I should never buy anything with electric heat. But he was already measuring the rooms. He flushed the toilets, ran the faucets, checked the fuse box in the kitchen. The linoleum was curling up around the refrigerator. As my father emptied the overflowing drip pan, I stood at the kitchen window, staring past the limp curtains into the tiny, green square of lawn. There was a swing set out there, with dusty furrows beneath each seat, and a sandbox covered with sheets of black plastic.
A thought formed itself in my mind: this could be your house someday.
And with that, as if he’d been listening to my thoughts, my father said, “How would you like a house like this?”
The question startled me. “Never buy a house with electric heat,” I said automatically.
“But if you were just starting out, though,” he persisted. “With a family.” There was something like pleading in his voice; he was begging me to listen. I tried to imagine raising children here, watching them play outside on the swings. My husband and I would paint the walls bright colors to hide the imperfections. We’d save money for a new refrigerator. We’d talk about replacing the carpeting.
“I’d be miserable,” I said. “I want to play the piano.”
“I thought you wanted to be a doctor someday.”
We both looked out the window at the empty swings.
“You could go to medical school,” my father said, “and become a doctor and then, after you’ve established a practice someplace, you could cut back on your patient load.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“So you could stay home more. With…little ones.”
He had really thought this through.
“But what if I don’t want children?”
My father turned the faucet on, then shut it off.
“What if I don’t want to get married?”
“The washer on this faucet is shot,” he said. “See how she leaks?”
“I don’t think I want to study medicine anymore.”
“She’s missing the aerator, too,” he said. “That’s how come the pressure’s so strong.” Then, abruptly, he sighed. “I just wonder if there isn’t somebody closer than Skokie,” he said.
I looked at him. So he had been listening after all.
“My teacher recommended this teacher,” I said.
My father tamped down the curled edge of linoleum with his foot, but it sprang right back up again. “Let’s get a picture,” he said.
Outside, the sun was still strong, though the shadows from the windbreak across the road were lengthening. My father took his old Polaroid Instamatic out of the glove compartment. He shot several pictures of the house from different angles, then spread them on the hood of car, waiting for them to develop.
“You can’t make a living playing the piano,” he said.
“I could play chamber music,” I said. “I could work as an accompanist. I could teach at a university, give private lessons on the side.”
My father touched each photograph with his fingertip.
“Or I could just marry for money. Some rich older man.”
The corners of my father’s mouth twitched upward.
“Which of these pictures do you like best?” he said.
I pointed to the one that showed a peek of the backyard.
“Me, too,” he said, and he smiled at me, pleased. And though neither of us said anything more about the lessons, I knew that I would be going to Skokie, if that was what I wanted. Watch out what you want, I reminded myself—but no. For once, the words had no power.
I wanted this. I wanted this desperately.
Driving home through the splintering twilight, I watched the ghost-shape of the ranch house fade. Fireflies blazed in the ditches. My life was going to change.
Six
Shortly after I turned fifteen, I decided to break up with my boyfriend, to make more time for my music. Bob was two years older than I was, and very earnest and sweet. I always knew when he was about to kiss me because he’d look left, then right, then left again, as if he were about to cross a busy street. Bob didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him drive me to my piano lessons in Skokie. What did I mean, I needed to concentrate? And why wouldn’t I come to the phone if he called while I was practicing? I was always practicing. Why did I have to be so disciplined all the time?
“Practice some other time,” he’d say. “I miss you.”
We had pulled over by the side of the road somewhere, and I had just noticed that the sharp yellow slice of asphalt lit by our headlights seemed to be, well, moving. But it didn’t seem like the right moment to bring this up. Billy Joel was singing “Honesty” on Bob’s eight-track tape player, and Bob, who was crying, was telling me he would always think of me whenever he heard that song. I said, “But I’m being honest,” and he said, patiently—he was so very patient—“I know that. That’s why I said I’ll think of you.”
“Oh,” I said. I had not told him I was breaking up with him because I wanted to be a concert pianist. What I’d told him was that I had decided to become a nun. I’d used the nun story before, at parties on the bluff, when I hadn’t wanted to drink or do bong hits or make out with some gross senior I’d never seen before. It was the sort of announcement that took people by surprise. Nobody ever doubted it. It was as if you’d announced you had lice. Everybody just stepped way back.
Bob wiped his nose on his sleeve. I watched uneasily as the asphalt rippled outside my window. It looked like water streaming across the road, only thicker. Deeper.
“So how long have you known?” he finally said.
“Not long.”
“Then how can you be sure?”
“I just am,” I said, even though the only thing I was sure of right then was that I didn’t want to see him looking left, then right, then left anymore. The collar of his letterman’s jacket lay heavy across the back of my neck. He was already talking about his class ring, how he wanted me to help him pick it out, how good it would look on my finger. I knew that if we dated for another few months, we’d sleep together. If we slept together for the next two years, we’d get engaged. We’d get married the summer after graduation. Until then, every Saturday night, I’d have to whisper what we’d done together into the dark booth where Father Stone sat like a shadow behind the scrim, his pale ear like a bottomless cup.
“I’m sorry,” I said stupidly.
“I need some air,” Bob said.
He got out and started to walk, and I opened up my door, too, saying, “Wait.”
“What the hell’s all over the road?” Bob said.
It was frogs. Thousands upon thousands. The sound was overwhelming. We hadn’t heard anything in the car, what with the windows rolled up, and Billy Joel singing about everyone being so untrue.
“Don’t move,” I sho
uted to Bob.
“Aw, shit!” Bob said, taking a huge step toward the car. He balanced on one foot, still crying. The underside of his white high-top was dark with goo.
“You’re killing them!” I said.
“I can’t help it!”
He took another step. Now I was crying, too. The frogs kept coming out of the tall swampy grasses along the roadside, wave after wave, like dark water rising, like a plague sent from the wrathful God in whom we both absolutely believed.
On lesson days, I got to leave my last class early. Nothing could have pleased me more. I waited for my mother at the high school flagpole, in the center of the courtyard, in full view of enough classroom windows to discourage anybody from bothering me. Dear God, I’d pray, let her be on time today, let her get here before the bell rings. My mother came directly from the elementary school, which let out earlier than the high school, but every now and then she’d get held up by some minor emergency. I’d close my eyes, force myself to keep them closed until I’d counted ten. Likely as not, by the time I peeked, her little red Pinto would be slipping and sliding around the icy circular drive. She’d pull up beside me, lean across the passenger’s seat to thump the sticking door.
“How was school?” she’d say, but I’d get in without answering, wait for her to fill the silence. It was only gassing up at the key-pump west of town that I finally started to breathe again, to shed the boiled yellow light of the classroom, to dissolve the wrinkled pit of nervousness that never fully left my chest. Early in my sophomore year I’d had the misfortune to catch the attention of three members of the wrestling team. Now, they knocked their hips against me if they passed me in the stairwell; they reached into their pants and grabbed themselves when they saw me coming down the hall. After school, I walked home in the street as they trailed me on the sidewalks, chucking small stones and apple cores at the backs of my legs. “We’re coming for you, sweetheart,” they’d call, and then they’d make loud, smacking sounds against the palms of their hands. Raised on stories from the Lives of the Saints, stories in which girls were canonized for choosing death over rape, I lived in the fear that I, too, might be forced to choose. And if God decided to test me in this way, I knew that I would fail. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to finish high school. I wanted to get into a good conservatory. I wanted…
…but was hard to imagine what I wanted. I knew only what I didn’t want: this school, this dry-throated uneasiness, this feeling I had not yet learned to identify as rage. It was 1980, the year of giving nippers. One boy, cheered on by a larger group, would grab an unpopular kid’s nipple, twist it hard enough to leave a bruise that—according to locker room wisdom—could give you cancer. I’d gotten a nipper back in September, and the pain had brought me to my knees. Now I was watching that breast anxiously. I had memorized the Seven Deadly Warning Signs.
The two-hour trip to Skokie was a break from all that. After a day spent holding my arms against my sides, it felt glorious to gesture again, to lift the hood of the Pinto and check the oil and wiper fluid, to reach the squeegee across the windshield while my mother topped off the gas. We made another pit stop, this time for doughnuts and coffee. Then we followed the two-lane highway toward the interstate, accelerating through the sprawl of car dealerships and billboards. We passed the dying farmhouses, dark and still as ghosts; the broken-backed barns; the fundamentalist church. We passed the new subdivisions, with their orderly rows of aluminum prefabs, their identical shrubs and listless trees, their snow-covered flowerpots. Home-made signs promised ANTIQUES 4 SALE; FREE UGLY KITTENS; A TAIL TO REMEMBER TAXIDERMY. A chipped plaster Virgin gazed vaguely at the frozen ground. Nearby stood a wooden cutout of a woman jack-knifed at the waist, fat buttocks pointing at the road.
But as soon as we’d merged onto I-43, the landscape opened like the palm of a hand, fields rising and falling in a gentle undulation like the breathing of a sleeping child. Here were the working dairy farms, each with its various outbuildings, its orchards, its windbreak of pines. Many of the houses had been built from quarry stone, with wide porches and steeply pitched roofs, and the same families had lived in them for generations. My mother told me stories she hadn’t heard so much as come to know, stories that spread from person to person the way pollen spreads flower to flower. These stories belonged to the houses in the same way that the houses, the farms, belonged to the land. These stories walked the pastures and slept in the beds and followed the children to school. They were larger, more permanent, than the people who had lived them and, like the people who had lived them, they’d been shaped by the space into which they’d been born: narrow staircases and drafty porches, packed-earth basements and cold root cellars, the crops and the harvests and the winter isolations, the whims of the weather and the clean, wide distance of the sky.
We passed a brick house with a new vinyl addition that sat on its head like a terrible wig. My mother described the woman who had lived there, a woman originally from Chicago. She had been the first person in the county to get linoleum, which she’d ordered not only for the kitchen but the living room as well. Everybody had been invited to see it on the day it was installed: she’d served coffee and pop and sweet chunks of Bundt cake, and people all agreed how very nice it looked. But the woman hadn’t known how to care for it, and the following day, she ruined it with floor wax. Within an hour, she’d polished away every last bit of that glorious shine.
Several miles to the south stood another, smaller house with a great front porch tacked across the front of it like a grin. The man who lived there had married a beautiful woman, and this woman had given birth to three daughters, all of whom inherited their mother’s golden hair. One night, when the girls were teenagers, the man had come home drunk, raging. He’d had enough of their vanities, he said. He was going to cut their hair, kick the Devil out of their hearts. While he fetched the pinking shears from the woman’s sewing basket, she managed to hurry the girls from their bedroom and hide them under the porch. There, shivering in their bathrobes, they listened to their mother’s pleadings, the long silence that followed, and when she finally came to get them, she wore a kerchief over her head. The man sobered up and apologized, but the woman’s hair never grew back the way it had been. He brought home expensive conditioners, treatments, but the woman passed them along to her daughters instead. He’d been right, she told company as her husband stared into his hands. She had been vain. She was too old to worry over something as foolish as her hair. It wasn’t as if they were youngsters any-more—oh, no, they were finished with all that, you’d better believe it. She was done with all the nonsense that had gone with a pretty head of hair.
This was the landscape my mother painted for me, spreading memory after memory over everything I saw like watercolors over a photograph. Before I knew it, we’d be passing through the suburban sprawl north of Milwaukee, riding the twisting overpasses through the downtown. My mother talked on. Here and there, she’d tighten her grip on the wheel, stopping midsentence if she needed to change lanes, but her voice, when she continued, always was steady, and she’d pick up exactly where she’d left off. I pressed my forehead against the cool window and listened to her voice the way I might have listened to music, following its highs and lows, anticipating its pauses, the inevitable shifts in tone, for my mother spoke to me on these drives the way, some day, she would often speak on our long trips to the Mayo clinic: as if she hadn’t spoken to anyone in years. As if she believed she had only the length of this drive, this single journey, to tell me everything she’d learned over the course of a lifetime.
I listened, daydreamed, listened some more. The city streets below the interstate seemed to move like my mother’s sentences: long and straight, running parallel to each other without ever actually connecting, punctuated by parking lots and schools, the exclamation points of church steeples straining for the sky. The lake in the distance was pale and empty, a place where anything might be written, unlike the city with its high-rises and clamor, its layerings,
its competing obligations. Old cathedrals lifted their chins beside new gas stations; strip malls quarreled with aging Victorians. Boxy brown apartment complexes and condos lined up on the horizon like soldiers on the march. This was an unfamiliar landscape, a language my mother didn’t speak. What we saw, we saw literally, with the concrete vision of the eye. Here a house was just a house and not the people who lived there. A bridge was only a bridge and not the story of its crossings.
Perhaps this was why, soon after we’d left Milwaukee behind, my mother’s gaze shifted inward. Now she talked about her childhood, about growing up the youngest of nine on the farm she still called home, about the way she and her sisters sang as they worked in the massive vegetable gardens, in the orchards, in the family’s fields, wearing dresses sewn from cotton feed sacks. She sang on Sundays, too, in the choir loft of Saint Nicholas Church, and she sang to herself at the preserving company, standing beside the conveyor belt, sorting clots of dirt and dead mice and twigs from the produce. She’d started working in the cannery fields the summer before her seventh birthday and, during our trips to Skokie, she took me along with her and her sisters. Mornings before dawn, we waited together, shivering in the early morning chill, for the truck that would shuttle us to the day’s work site. She showed me how to fight my way to the outside of the truckbed, where we could hang on to the wooden slats, bracing ourselves for balance. She taught me how to breathe through my mouth to avoid the sick-sweet smell of exhaust. How to duck the streams of tobacco juice that the driver spat from his open window.
“Well, no,” my mother said, surprised by my question, “nobody ever fell off the truck because, if they had, they would have been killed.” She mused, drifting briefly toward the guard rail, then jerked us back into our lane. “And sometimes we carried knives. We’d have landed on those knives, even if the fall itself hadn’t killed us.”
And what were the knives for?
“Spinach.” My mother bit deep into the word. “When it was in season. But mostly, we picked beans. Penny and a half a pound.”
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